Prof Dr Andrew Benjamin
Kingston University London,
Faculty of Arts and Social Siences
London, 19 November 2014, 16:30
Warburg Institute
Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB
Autor: Max Weber Stiftung
The Max Weber Foundation promotes global research, focused on the areas of social sciences, cultural studies and the humanities. Our research is conducted at ten institutes in various countries across the globe with different and independent fields of focus. Through our globally operating institutes, we are able to contribute to the communication and networking between Germany and our host countries or regions. By promoting academic dialogue and merging academic and non-academic employees from several countries with different cultural backgrounds, the Max Weber Foundation is able to strengthen the internationalization of research.
Prof Dr Victor I. Stoichita Université de Fribourg, Faculté des Lettres
London, 29 October 2014, 16:30 Warburg Institute Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB
Along with its central characters – Nathanael, a young student; the optician Coppelius; and Olimpia, his daughter – E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1817 story Der Sandmann has firmly established a place for itself in the European cultural canon.1 For instance, the tale presented composer Jacques Offenbach with the material for one of the acts of his 1881 opéra fantastique Les contes d’Hoffmann. As Hoffmann’s story unfolds, Nathanael falls madly in love with Olimpia, while perhaps also falling into madness. Consequently, his discovery that she is actually an automaton constructed by her ‘father’ Coppelius, who in turn doubles as the menacing sandman Coppola out on the hunt for Nathanael’s eyes, hovers in an insolubly ambiguous state between the literary depiction of a mad person’s delusions and the representation of a world in which the common laws of reality don’t apply. As such the text has served as prime subject matter for by now classical interpretations and first rank theorizations.
From antiquarian visions of prehistory to the politics of modern popular culture, it has been a productive summer, and congratulations are due once again, this time to group coordinator Johannes von Müller on the release of his chapter in the edited volume Comics & Politik/Comics and Politics. The volume approaches the comic as record of, respondent to and participant in the political worlds of the modern age. It examines the varied uses of the genre internationally and the place of comic-book art within and at the edges of popular culture. Johannes’ chapter compares the works of the nineteenth-century caricaturist, Honoré Daumier, and the twentieth-century cartoonist Carl Barks.
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Congratulations #1: Hans-Christian Hönes Kunst am Ursprung: Das Nachleben der Bilder und die Souveränität des Antiquars (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014)
The ‘Bilderfahrzeuge’ project brings together researchers working on a wide range of topics. So far, there has been no shortage of exciting conversations crossing periods, disciplinary lines and geographical regions of study. The idea of such a research ecosystem, in which individual projects overlap and intersect with shared interests and aims, is one of the things which makes this project so exhilarating. While conversations go on in the background and inform and develop research, however, it is in publications, exhibitions and other public outputs that the results are most often seen (and where the day-to-day hard work so often is spent). In this first ‘Congratulations’, therefore, we would all like to applaud Hans-Christian on the release of his book, Kunst am Ursprung: Das Nachleben der Bilder und die Souveränität des Antiquars (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014), emerging from his doctoral research.